by Gregg Olsen
“How else could they have survived and the others die?”
“Yeah, and did you see that they didn’t look as bedraggled as they should have?”
In disasters like the Sunshine fire, truth frequently yields to emotion. Sour grapes taste sweet when pain becomes impossible to bear. Garnita Keene put up with nasty remarks from women who thought their husbands and boyfriends should have been the ones to survive. Flory was a drug addict and Wilkinson was a drunkard. They were lazy sons of bitches who didn’t know a whiz-bang from their own assholes. She knew the bitterness came from sudden, unbearable grief and an overwhelming sense of unfairness, so she said nothing.
Yeah, both boys drank their share, she thought to herself. But so did everyone else. And drug addict? I doubt Ron ever used drugs in his entire life. He’s too damn cheap. For God’s sake, Myrna went to the Laundromat because Ron didn’t want to open his wallet to buy a washer and dryer.
“Why did God save them and not the others?” one woman asked.
“I don’t have the answers,” Myrna’s sister said. “Only God knows.”
Among those who questioned God’s choice was Don Beehner’s widow, Wava. Others had told her that neither of the survivors was any good; they were druggies or lazy or any number of things her husband had never been. She’d heard they were sleeping behind an air door. They weren’t even working like the rest of the men. For a time, bitterness supplanted the sadness she felt for her own loss.
“It is unfair,” she told her pastor. “What right do they have to live when so many good guys died?”
“Wava, it is fair,” he said. “Don was ready to meet God. He gave his life for another man. These men have been given a second chance. If they don’t do something with it, they’ll be condemned to hell.”
“I don’t like them,” Wava said. “If not Don, then why not another man? There were so many good men that could have done so much.”
“I don’t want you to hate them,” he said. “It’s okay not to like them, but don’t hate them.”
She promised to try.
Meanwhile, Garnita didn’t tell Myrna, but sometimes she believed it would have been better if Ron and Tom had died. She knew Ron was having nightmares, and she expected that it hadn’t been easy for Tom, either. Everybody wants to live, but living after something so terrible, after something that took so many others . . . what a dreadful gift it was. And each camera flash or congratulations card only served to remind Flory and Wilkinson of their good fortune and the immeasurable grief that had overtaken the mining district. Although the pair had been alone together for eight days, they wanted to get away from the hordes of people, the media, the letters, and the funerals. They needed to get away from the whole damn thing. They planned a camping trip.
MORNING, MAY 10
4800 Level
THE SKIN COVERING THE BLACKENED TORSOS OF THE DEAD WAS rigid, like a leather glove that had been soaked in water, then kiln-dried. Nothing remained to suggest their former humanness other than the oddity of their tongues, protruding from mouths that looked like open knotholes. Among the dead on 4800, Johnny Lang came across his opposite shift partner, Davy Mullin. Mullin was slumped near the phone. Only a distinctive collection of blasting company stickers on his hardhat gave away his identity. Of the six others, Lang couldn’t determine which one was Gordy Whatcott, his other partner; all were too far gone. Through the creepy smoke veil, he ventured toward the half-drilled face on the stope where they’d last worked. Mullin or Whatcott had halted in the midst of drilling—just flat-out stopped. They expected to be right back, Lang thought. Everything was set up to grind that rock for blasting at shift’s end.
By late Wednesday all the bodies on 4800 had been accounted for, and Lang went home, where he answered a call from partner Gordy Whatcott’s wife, Wilmyra.
“Did you hear anything?”
“Why hasn’t the mine called you?” Lang was thunderstruck, then furious.
“I know that Flory and Wilkinson got out. Somebody told me that the other men they found could have been some engineers that were dead down there. Gordy and Davy could be back in their stope waiting for help.”
Her words were strung together with a thin reed of hope.
Lang confronted Al Walkup at the mine.
“What’s the deal here? How come you haven’t told them women what’s happened to their men? Giving them hope when there really isn’t any—it ain’t right.”
“We can’t tell them until is official,” Walkup said.
The young boxer from Texas could barely rein himself in. “Jesus! Flory and Wilkinson were down there. They knew all them guys. And they went back to the station and they knew that nobody was alive!”
“We can’t tell anyone until it’s official.”
“It’s a damn fact! I’m telling Gordy’s wife.”
Lang drove right over to the Whatcotts’ place in Kellogg and waited on the steps, rehearsing what he’d say, how he’d tell her. He was good with words, but he couldn’t find any that would provide both truth and comfort.
Wilmyra Whatcott came to the door, her face pale, her skin tissue-thin.
“He’s not coming home,” Lang said. When his own tears fell, he turned away.
Forty-nine
AFTERNOON, MAY 10
5000 Level
A SUMP PUMP ON 5000 HAD FAILED AND WATER HAD CASCADED OVER the station and pooled in the drift before running like a river to God knew where. There were two bodies found on the level. Bunker Hill rescue man Harry Cougher went to the first man, facedown on a mass of pipes on the station. He slipped open a body bag and began to roll the swollen corpse into the vinyl envelope. He’d shifted the corpse into the bag and started to zip it shut when he saw the man’s glove floating in three inches of black water. Procedure required that all personal effects be packed in with the body with which it belonged. Cougher reached down and grasped the glove. It wasn’t a glove. The man’s skin had sloughed off into a single piece.
“Oh my God,” Cougher said through his mask. He picked up the skin glove and put it into the bag.
A look at each of the dead brought only silence and memories. Many had been boys on the district’s Little League team; they had skipped school together, and conspired to get into Delores Arnold’s hook house. Some were rivals, but they had grown up together. Lifting a buddy who was nearly a brother with an aluminum snow shovel was probably the toughest thing a man could ever do. The recovery team worked in pairs or in trios, scooping up bodies while another man slid a bag underneath. Sometimes it took up to four men to do it. Miners, of course, came in all sizes.
Corpses were arranged several deep and the cage was belled up, a last ride to daylight at the collar. A thousand feet of steel cable separated the hoistmen from their reeking cargo, but ferrying the bodies still unnerved the men at the controls. They could feel that the weight was lifeless.
The 5200 level was the last chance for survivors, and everyone working underground knew it. The level had access to 10-Shaft, and with good air coming in on 4800 from the borehole, it seemed possible that someone could survive down there. But all hope died at 7:06 p.m. All there were dead, though it appeared they’d survived longer than those on the upper levels. Using brattice cloth, a kind of fire-retardant burlap, they had time to start building a bulkhead on the north tail drift off the station. Three bodies were discovered in a cluster by a motor. One man had been running the motor, and the other two had been passengers. The driver was wedged between the motor and the ribs. Two additional victims were found on the station side of the attempted seal, but the rest had melted into a big, hideously foul pile of cadavers, BM-1447s scattered like seashells on a muddy beach. All but one—the fellow nearest to an open air line—were gruesomely decomposed. Had he lived longer than the others? Long enough to see everyone else die? Some also posited that the toxic cloud had hastened decomposition, and since the last man standing on 5200 was showered by clean compressed air, he had stayed better preserved. Among thos
e victims were the Delbridges, a father-and-son pair; Roger Findley’s brother, Lyle; and Garnita Keene’s boyfriend, Billy Allen. Twenty-one had died on 5200.
Al Walkup notified topside that all the men were accounted for and it was over. The hope for another miracle had evaporated into the cold, damp mountain air.
LATE AFTERNOON, MAY 10
Sunshine Mine Yard
RAIN FELL IN SHEETS, SENDING MUDDY RIVULETS DOWN THE BANKS of Big Creek and turning its clear waters to creamed coffee. Susan Markve, whose father, Louis Goos, was never coming home, told her family that God was crying. The remaining rescue men moved about in yellow slickers. Water filled the footprints of the families who had stood vigil for more than a week. With the discovery of each clutch of bodies, the families left the water-soaked tent and went home. Only a handful waited until the end. The pastor of a small congregation formed a circle of some of the remaining, stuck in Purgatory and still hoping. Lee Haynes held the hand of the wife of a man who’d served in his unit in the reserves and they repeated the Lord’s Prayer. Marvin Chase almost melted into the muddy ground. He was shaky, and could barely make eye contact. Not for shame, but because seeing hope fade to despair had become too difficult to take in. He told the waiting family members that the rescue crews had made it to 4400 and 5200. There they’d found seventeen more bodies, but no survivors. The only consolation was that the tragedy had occurred swiftly, even down on the lower levels. On 4400, seven bodies had been found. Three were found clustered around an oxygen cylinder that they’d apparently used to keep alive. Others had likely already succumbed. They were around a lunch table, buckets open and sandwiches out.
“Please go home,” mine manager Chase told those who’d waited until the very end. He promised to notify family members when there was more news.
A woman found her voice and let out a guttural scream.
“They lied to us! They said they were pumping air into the mine, and they weren’t.”
A chilly wind blew across the portal. The site had gone from a place of support and shared misery to a ghost town. Joanne Reichert stood on the little bridge and surveyed the yard. The air was icy. Empty chairs and garbage littered the yard like the leavings of an outdoor concert. Chase repeated that there weren’t any more survivors. Her legs buckled.
“It’s all over,” Chase said firmly. “Go home.”
The rage of the long wait boiled over.
“You sons of bitches!” she screamed. “You fucking sons of bitches!”
The fury of the outburst jolted her sister. “Joanne!”
“Please go home, ma’am,” Chase said.
Her hysteria was a volcano. Someone tugged at her and she started to move back to the car.
It’s all over and no one saved Jack. The fucking mine killed him. Killed them all.
“Murderer!” a woman yelled as Marvin Chase turned from the crowd of reporters and the family members who had given up their coveted folding chairs to hear what he had to say. The woman’s eyes were all wept out, and family members bolstered her weakened body. The mine manager pretended not to hear. Nothing he could say would make one bit of difference, anyway. The truth was that the relationship between miners and their bosses had always been adversarial. But as the Sunshine body count piled up, it began to dawn on some who’d lost their partners and friends that perhaps all those deaths weren’t the cost of the job, but the result of a lackadaisical attitude toward their safety. Sunshine safety engineer Launhardt could preach all he wanted that the mine was as safe as the laws allowed, and he could have been absolutely right. Launhardt’s concern was genuine, but that didn’t mean that the laws in place were adequate enough to protect the men. Where were the teeth to the law? In Pittsburgh, the president of the Steelworkers called for a repeal of the Federal Mine Safety Act. Union president I. W. Abel charged that the USBM was in bed with mine operators. “A nation that affords the ultimate in protection for its astronauts and their collection of moon rocks must likewise see that the miners who extract vitally needed earth ore are extended the same protection,” he said.
No argument from the people of Kellogg.
LAUNHARDT’S FATHER-IN-LAW WROTE IN HIS DIARY, ON THE SADDEST day: “The final curtain has been drawn on the Sunshine Mine disaster and 91 of the 93 men have been found dead. . . . Bob was here for the first time since the fire broke out. There are the usual rumors of inefficiency in the mine, and this might be so, but Sunshine is no different from any of the other mines in the area. . . . ”
Fifty
MORNING, MAY 11
Coeur d’Alene Mining District
THE LOBBY OF THE SHOSHONE INN NURSING HOME RESEMBLED a car lot of coffins, all gleaming and orderly: rounded corners and burnished steel on the better ones in the front; plainer ones that looked more like boxes in the back. Cager Roger Findley came to inquire about making a visual identification of his brother. Lyle Findley had a peculiar patch of white pubic hair, and no matter how badly his body had been pumped up in the heat of the mine, nothing could alter his bull’s-eye spot. In what surely was a kindness, a funeral director told Findley that his request would be denied. Findley didn’t even think of arguing. He wanted to remember Lyle as he’d been on elk-hunting trips up the Coeur d’Alene, or even as the big brother who’d kicked him in the butt when he went on a three-day drinking binge.
Joanne Reichert also came to be convinced. It took everything she had to show up when Jack Reichert’s family had let her know in both direct and subtle ways that she wasn’t welcome. Reichert’s father approached her with visible disdain.
“You have no right to be here,” he said. “You aren’t his wife.”
She kept her mouth shut and went to talk to a funeral director.
“I want to see Jack,” she said, her voice splintering.
“I’m sorry, but that’s not possible,” he said.
She persisted, and the man turned off his compassionate, kindly façade. “The bodies are all bloated,” he said as directly as he could. “You don’t want to see him. They had to identify the men by their lamp numbers.”
Joanne returned to Big Creek wanting to bury herself on their bed and cry. Everywhere she looked—from his clothes in the closet to the guitar stashed in the corner of the front room—all of it was him. She didn’t want to leave. The house was Jack. Joanne bitterly watched June Reichert and other “real” wives swoop into town to get what was theirs. In some cases those “real” wives had thrown their men out for drinking or carousing, or because they’d just had enough of being a miner’s wife. Yet there they were, sitting in the catbird seat with their purses wide open. Joanne Reichert found out that the piece of paper that was a marriage license held more power than promises when she went up to the mine office to inquire about Jack Reichert’s insurance. He had told her that he had made her his beneficiary. “As my wife,” he had said.
Joanne spoke with a woman in the office.
“I’m sorry,” the clerk said. “Your name’s not on it.”
“But he told me I was.”
“Sorry. His son is listed as his beneficiary.”
The news crushed her. It wasn’t the money, though she really needed it. It was because he hadn’t done as he’d promised. Before Reichert died, everyone thought that he was married to her. All of a sudden, everything about them had turned into something very ugly. She was a whore, a shack-up who had tried to pawn herself off as something better than she was. One day she was a woman in love, the next day she was a small-town pariah.
New York photographers for Life magazine arrived at the Kitchen home in Hayden Lake to take pictures. Donna, just out of the shower, had her hair wrapped in a towel in each image. Delmar Kitchen smiled faintly, but his expression was a mask. In less than two years he’d gone from being one of the Kitchen men to being the sole survivor. Before the Life people finished, the Kitchens handed over family photos that showed both father and son in better times. Dewellyn, with his dark hair and intense eyes, had a tough-guy persona tha
t even the cheesiest Instamatic camera could capture. The photographs, of course, didn’t show the story behind the man, a father who’d blow his entire paycheck on taking his kids to a carnival, and tell the utility company to take a hike when its bill was past due. A photo of patriarch Elmer Kitchen showed him exultant with a first-place ribbon from the county fair for raising the biggest cabbage that year. No one outside of the family, and certainly no man in the mine, knew that twenty-seven-year mining veteran Elmer Kitchen was a gardener. No one knew that when his children were small, he always came home from the mine or the woods with a treat in his dinner bucket. He would chug through the ryegrass field toward the front door, but he’d never make it all the way before his pack of children rushed to see what he brought them. One time, when he was working in the woods logging, he brought home a baby rabbit. Another time he showed up with a swan. The kids put it in a pond and kept it as a pet.
Over in Woodland Park, Wava Beehner put on a brave face, got in the station wagon, and drove up Big Creek Road to see about workmen’s compensation and Social Security benefits. In the Sunshine personnel office she found Jim Farris behind his desk, sorting through claims and adding names to a growing ledger. He was obviously dismayed by the figures and the complexity of some of the men’s marital lives. A widow with no children would receive about $230 a month; a widow with children would get a maximum of $306. Social Security would pay up to $440, depending on the number of dependent children.
“Thank God I don’t have to worry about you, Wava,” he said. “You were married to Don. You were his only wife, and he didn’t have any kids with anyone else.”
All morning Farris had been trying to sort out an unbelievable mess. So far, six women had come forward to make claims—wives no one had ever heard about.
“You wouldn’t believe the mess I got here,” he went on, pointing at papers. “I’ve got this one who came from down south and showed up to get this guy’s life insurance, and he’s been with this other woman for ten years. They’ve got four kids. But he never divorced the first one. I had to give the other woman the money. The kids don’t get anything.”
